Sight Word Activities: Colors

Sight Word Activities: Colors

Edward William Dolch, Ph.D. published a book called Problems in Reading which devoted an entire chapter to sight words, specifically obtaining an ideal sight word vocabulary list. He realized the short comings of memorizing a standard word list containing hundreds of words. As a result, he published a list of 220 basic sight words that a child should learn to automatically recognize upon sight. This basic sight vocabulary included some colors.

Dolch’s Sight Words – Color

Dolch included the following seven colors on his list of 220 sight words.

  • black
  • blue
  • brown
  • green
  • red
  • white
  • yellow

Sight Words – Two More Colors

The above colors are included on many sight word lists. In addition, we recommend including the following two colors:

  • orange
  • purple

The words, orange and purple, can be referred to as standalones. In other words, they do not rhyme with another word. Since the English language is filled with patterns and similar sounds, there are only a handful of these words (see below for more information on standalones). Can you think of a word that rhymes with purple or orange? If you do, please let me know!

Sight Word Activities – Color

The following activities incorporate Dolch’s 7 sight word colors as well as the colors, orange and purple.

Common Standalones

In case you are curious, the following are common standalones:

exit film hundred hungry
infant month noisy nothing silver
sixth tablet wasp Wednesday zebra


Completing sight word activities are great exercises that assist a child in developing a sight word vocabulary.

Related Posts:


{ 1 trackback }